Some Free Webinars, a Lightroom Tip (and stuff)

? The webcast with Scott and I ran into some technical glitches yesterday. We’ve rescheduled for next Thursday April 21 at 3pm EDT.
? Datacolor (makers of the Spyder calibration system) is hosting a free webinar called “How to Capture Color”
? Don’t forget to follow me over at Facebook and Twitter for random updates during the week. (PS: Make sure you click “Like” on Facebook and not a friend request – I actually don’t do anything with my personal page anymore so you won’t see the updates if you “Friend” it)
? Today is the last day to participate in Westcott’s Photoshop World Shootout Contest. If you went to the show and have any photos from the Westcott booth, make sure you upload them.
? And finally, a quick Lightroom Tip… In Lightroom 3, when you import your photos (File > Import Photos), you’ll see the large dialog that opens. Of course it’s got a ton of options in it, most of which you don’t need on a daily basis when importing. If you’re like me (God help you!), you pretty much just choose a different folder destination, but everything else usually remains the same. If that’s the case, you can minimize the dialog to just show you the essentials by clicking that minimize button (downfacing arrow) in the bottom left corner of the dialog.

Matt is the Vice President of Photography for onOne Software and a Tampa-based photographer. He's a best selling author of over 20 books and teaches Lightroom and Photoshop at seminars and conferences around the world.

5 Comments

This is off topic – just wanted to let you know Adobe now has a Lightroom 3 Certification Exam and Examaids for Lightroom 3 are available. I know this because – of course – I just took and passed Lightroom 2 and received an email about the upgrade a week later. Gawd!

Hey Matt, I am following you on Twitter, but you aren’t tweeting your blog posts and I am getting to things late. RSS just gets too cluttered and difficult to follow, but I find that I am more likely to see it on Twitter.

By the way, in your Q&A about HDR you said you do a five frame bracket and discard the +1 and -1 frames. Uhm… why not just set a three frame bracket then with +2, metered. -2? Also, some DSLR’s have the ability to go to +/-3 EV, does that mean that their sensors can capture a 7 stop range, and is there a benefit when processing HDR to use this?

Thanks for the tip, Matt, I didn’t realize the arrow was there! Let me add that I, too, rename my photos on import, usually to something pretty generic to reflect the group I’m importing. I would guess that a fair number of people rename on import, as well. Perhaps Adobe could add a custom text field to the collapsed view to streamline the import process?

There’s one thing missing from this ‘simplified import dialog’ to make it really useful, IMHO: I use file renaming templates with a variable ‘Custom Text’ in them, and the Custom Text field only shows up in the Expanded View.